What does it mean to be a servant leader?

Project Management practices teach PMs to be leaders, to drive results and to complete the project on time, on budget and on scope. In Agile, we are expecting our leaders to stand in front of the team to take the criticisms but to be behind them and let them do their job.

Too often managers/leaders fall back into the directing mode, telling the teams what to do and how. There needs to be a better understanding of what servant leadership means, how to achieve it and why it is important.

This session will explore the different styles of leadership and why, for Agile, servant leadership is important.

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Case Study

Beginner

When it comes to scaling Agile, there is no one size fits all solution. Frameworks like Scrum and XP prescribe roles, events, artifacts, and rules that make it very clear how interaction should take place within a team. When we begin to add more teams to the mix, communication between teams becomes more complex. This complexity threatens to reduce our transparency and damage our culture. How can we share information, build our culture and work together, all while keeping with Agile values?

During this session Sam Lightowler and Jade Stephen will take an in depth look at the successes and failures of CBC Digital Operations when it comes to cross-team collaboration and information sharing. We will discuss what meetings and techniques have helped us build a one-team-one-product mindset, a sense of community, and a culture of Collaboration, Learning and Improvement. We will also discuss what we have tried in the past and how learning from those experiments helped us evolve into the agile-friendly and unified team that we are today.

Matt Barcomb - Deliver more effectively using flow-based road mapping

schedule 2 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

If you’d like an alternative to typical, quarter-by-quarter, schedule oriented road mapping (and all the associated waste) then this session is for you. Matt Barcomb will introduce a Cadenced Flow approach to flow-based road mapping.

He will first cover how to layout and execute a road map based on models that better fit software planning as well as how to transform your existing plans. Next, using options thinking to frame work will be explored and how to use starting and stopping triggers for options, reducing the need of blind budgeting or project practices. Finally, Matt will wrap up by touching on a few key metrics that will let you monitor and evaluate your new road map.

toddcharron - Status and Power Improv

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Are you as powerful as you need to be? Do you over power the room and rub people the wrong way?

Why is that? What if there was something you could do about it?

In improvisation, in order to create realistic and compelling characters we study status. That is, how does how we carry ourselves impact our relationship status with other people and how does it change in relation to others?

In this session, we'll explore status, and play with making ourselves more or less powerful. We'll then examine how this plays out in our work environments and how we need to adjust our status depending on which groups or individuals we're interacting with.

You'll also learn the one status trick that will dramatically increase your chances of getting hired in your next interview.

Paul J. Heidema / Wessam Nasser - The Being and Doing of Agile

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Why do so many agile implementations fail? What can be done to improve our success?

Agile has become a powerful phrase and cultural movement that is often misunderstood and poorly executed. Why, because Agile is seen as another project management tool. Nope. Agile is much more than a set of frameworks, practices, and tools. To get truly long-lasting results that affect the deep culture of an organization, leaders and coaches need to employ both the "Being and Doing" of agile for the greatest chance of success.

The participants will go through a powerful exercise to see how willing and open they are to the Being of Agile which includes the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto.

Paul Heidema and Wessam Nasser will take the group through a simple and powerful exercise to identify how receptive and willing an organization is towards agile. With more than 10 combined years of helping teams, leaders, and organizations, Paul and Wessam can aid each participant to improve their chances of becoming truly agile.

Both Paul and Wessam have facilitated this workshop at organizations and public events with positive feedback and energy.

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Mob programming is collaboration taken to the extreme, eliciting the best from every member of the team. In this session, you will experience the dynamics of mob programming and learn how to use this technique successfully in your own environments.

After mobbing with over two dozen teams, we've seen definite patterns emerge, that we'll discuss here.

Mike Bowler / Ellen Grove - Putting the Moose on the Table: Make your retrospectives more effective using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY techniques

schedule 2 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

In order for teams to step into high performance. it's critical that they develop the practice of having effective conversations about what is and isn't working. Yet in practice, the retrospective meeting is often the least-valued of the agile events: team members feel that their retros are boring, repetitive, and superficial.

In this workshop, we will teach participants how to design and deliver a really useful retrospective using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. We'll cover the basics of this powerful facilitation technique, and give advice about how to build your own SERIOUS PLAY kit using pieces easily available at the local toy store. We'll also offer practical suggestions for how to design a retro that gets everyone talking (and building), and results in the team agreeing on action.

The participants will leave with a powerful retrospective technique that they can immediately use with their teams.

Ahmad Sadr Ghayeni - Common Challenges to Agile transformations: 500 or 10,000+ same issues at different degrees

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

We’ve been fortunate enough to help organizations in their Agile transformation that impacted 500 to 15,000+ practitioners.

They all seem to have similar challenges but at different degrees. In this talk we’re going to share and explore some of our observations leading small and large scale transformations, the challenges that nearly sunk a dream and how we tackled them.

The focus will be on challenges facing transformations at scale, setting up a transformation for success, how to manage change, and the role of leadership and what’s impeding them to be effective.

Mike Kaufman - Drive & Motivation: How to Motivate Your Team

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

You have a brand new team. You inherit a pre-existing team, but one person seems a little unproductive. Your team is in shambles. You're a newly-hired manager and walk in on day one and want to impress your new underlings. You're a Product Owner and just came back from a great session with the customer, ready to tell the team.

What do all of the above scenarios have in common? You are looking for ways to inspire and motivate your team members into action. You want to drive them towards a vision you have. Or you need to find a way to "deal with" that one "bad apple" in the team, so the whole team can be that much more productive and effective.

But how do you do this?? Come and listen, and experience first hand, some simple experiments that will help you figure out how to inspire and motivate your team members.

Jason Little - How to Interview and Hire an Agile Coach

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

"We seek and Agile Coach/Project Manager to enforce our Agile best practices. The ideal candidate must have the ability to walk on water, magically change all organizational processes, convince executives to just be Agile, and install JIRA. The ideal candidate must be PMP, BsC in Engineering, CSM, CSP, CSPO, PSM I, II and III, SAFe 4.0, MBA of All The Things and other relevant certifications as dictated by our HR department." Did your Agile Coach end up being a dud? While Agile has largely crossed the chasm, the art of Agile Coaching is one of the most mis-understood roles in the industry today which is why we end up with job postings that cram so much detail into their description . If the coach is helping the team improve, what do the managers do? How do you measure the effectiveness of your coaches? Should Agile Coaching be a permanent structure in your organization, or a temporary one? In this session we'll dymystify Agile Coaching and give you practical tools to figure out the best way to interview, and hire, coaches for your organization.

Lee Elliott - No Jerks!

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

We've all been there. We have to deal with them in all aspects of our lives. We've all had them on our teams. They have a name: Jerk.

There are some things agile can fix and some things people that can't be fixed. With agile we can improve the work life for almost everyone, by increasing communication, increasing collaboration and minimizing the Jerks. It won't help with the chronic non-flusher, but for your teams it will help.

Jeff Kosciejew - Conway's Law & Organizational Design

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Panel

Advanced

What's the best way to structure an organization? What's the best way to build and align teams?

Join a panel, which includes Chris Chapman, Mike Kaufman, Peter LePiane, and Geoff Beers, for a discussion and Q&A of what these experienced coaches have seen work, and not work, in various sized organizations. We'll look at organizational design, department design, and team design. We'll dive into the the benefits and pitfalls which come with the coordination and collaboration impacts of these design choices, and frameworks that have been used in various designs.

And we'll explore starting points to consider for getting started, since we'll find there are no silver bullets for success!

Jeff Kosciejew / Shawn Button - Which Agile is Right?

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Just do a quick search on the Internet, and you'll find plenty of opinions and approaches to Agile. Talk to a few Agile Thought-Leaders, and you'll find even more opinions. Then, talk to a few current practitioners, and you'll find even more opinions and perspectives. Each one of those sources likely has a legitimate perspective.

While all of the expert opinions are based in similar values and principles, how those values and principles are implemented can (and does) vary immensely. This discussion explores some of the challenges and options.

Is one right? Are some wrong?Are they all right? How might that even be possible?And if you're new to Agile, how on earth do you know which to listen to, and which to ignore?Heck, even if you're not new to Agile, there's a lot of differing opinions from which to chose!

Join Shawn Button & Jeff Kosciejew, two experienced Agile Coaches with very different journeys into Agile Coaching, explore a few of the common frameworks and approaches they've seen, and experienced. This discussion explores some of the challenges and options in what some have to offer, and possible starting points in this journey, while providing context for experienced agilists in how we could be perceived.

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

60 Mins

Case Study

Beginner

Five years after the initial adoption of Agile, PointClickCare had grown from 10 development teams to 40, from a single market focus to serving multiple markets each with their own distinct needs, and from a general software platform to a core solution with multiple, market-specific modular variations and add-on modules. Through rapid growth, teams had been stretched, juggled and supplemented to support the continued need for new products, and the process that worked for 10 teams was showing signs of strain. To reinvigorate their Agile methodology implementation, and to set the stage for future success, PointClickCare set off to rejuvenate their Agile approach.

Over the course of two years, PointClickCare gathered input and feedback from teams, management and software industry experts, and worked through various experiments and pilots to rework their development process. PointClickCare began implementing new and improved practices to promote a process and culture that would carry through further growth.

This case study will show you where PointClickCare started, the indicators that showed where improvements were needed, the steps taken to research, plan and execute organizational change, and the lessons learned from the experience.

Jeff Kosciejew / Lee Elliott - The Magic of Perception

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

In this interactive session, we’ll explore how each of us views the world differently and how our perception is shaped by everything we've previously experienced. Through magic, illusions, and an interactive exercise, Jeff reveals the ways our perceptions and biases influence our reality and how our individual realities are unique.

Discovering your distinct personal perspective by understanding how biases impact how we make sense of the world around us, we can learn to better understand others. We can gain insights which inform our interactions with customers, colleagues, and competitors.

You'll leave this session with an appreciation for working with others, and approaches to team problem solving in our complex world. No magic spells required.